Jacques Derrida, The Last European

In Paris of May 2004, at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of Le Monde diplomatique, in one of the last acts of his extraordinary public career, Jacques Derrida issued an impassioned call to resist globalization (mondialisation) and US unilateralism in the name of Europe. A year earlier, on May 31, he and Jürgen Habermas had published an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung invoking the “Wiedergeburt Europas” (the “rebirth of Europe”). Authored by Habermas and co-signed by Derrida, the publication signaled a startling gesture of unity between two philosophers who had, to say the least, failed to find common ground for the past several decades.